Blockchain Revolution

4.
The Metering Economy

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Perhaps blockchain technology can take us beyond the sharing economy into a
metering economy where we can rent out and meter the use of our excess capacity.
One problem with the actual sharing economy, where, for example, home owners
agree to share power tools or small farming equipment, fishing gear, a woodworking
shop, garage or parking, and more, was that it was just too much of a hassle. “There
are 80 million power drills in America that are used an average of 13 minutes,”
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky wrote in The New York Times. “Does everyone really need
their own drill?”
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The trouble is, most people found it easier and more cost-effective to make one
trip to Home Depot and buy a drill for $14.95 than rent it for $10 from someone a
mile away, making two trips. Wrote Sarah Kessler in Fast Company magazine: “The
Sharing Economy is dead and we killed it.”
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But with blockchains we can rent our excess capacity for certain commodities that
are pretty much zero hassle—Wi-Fi hot spots, computing power or storage capacity,
the heat generated by our computers, our extra mobile minutes, even our expertise—
without lifting a finger, let alone schlepping to and from some stranger’s house across
the city. When you travel, your Wi-Fi can rent out itself in your absence, charging
fractions of pennies for every second of usage. Your imagination (and possibly new
regulation) is your only limit. Your subscriptions, physical space, and energy sources
can now become sources of income, metering their use directly to a counterparty and
charging them for it through micropayments. All you need is a decentralized value
transfer protocol to allow them to safely and securely transact with one another. These
platforms instill subsidiary rights in all our assets. You need to decide the extent to
which you want to assign others usage and access rights—even the right to exclude
others from using your assets—and what to charge for those rights.
This can work for physical assets too. For example, we’ve heard a lot about
autonomous vehicles. We can build an open transportation network on the blockchain
where owners each have a private encrypted key (number) that lets them reserve a car.
Using the public key infrastructure and existing blockchain technologies like
EtherLock and Airlock, they can unlock and use the car for a certain amount of time,
as specified by the rules of the smart contract—all the while paying the vehicle (or its
owners) in real time for the time and energy that they use—as metered on a
blockchain. Because blockchain technology is transparent, the group of owners can
track who is abiding by their commitments. Those who aren’t take a reputational hit
and eventually lose access altogether.
5.
The Platform Builders

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Enterprises create platforms when they open up their products and technology
infrastructures to outside individuals or communities that can cocreate value or new
businesses. One type is prosumers, customers who produce.
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In a dynamic world of
customer innovation, a new generation of producer-consumers considers the “right to
hack” its birthright. Blockchain technology supercharges prosumption. Nike running
shoes could generate and store data on a distributed ledger that, in turn, Nike and the
shoe wearer could monetize as agreed in their smart contract. Nike could offer a tiny
piece of its shares with every pair it sells, if the customer agrees to activate the smarts
in the shoes, or even sync her shoes to other wearables, such as a heart monitor or
glucose level calculator or other valuable data for Nike.
Some platforms differ from prosumer communities where a company decides to
cocreate products with its customers. With open platforms, a company offers partners
a broader venue for staging new businesses or simply adding value to the platform.
Now with blockchain technology companies can quickly create platforms and
partner with others to create platforms or utilities for an entire industry. Robin Chase
founded Zipcar (a service aggregator) as well as Buzzcar (users can share their cars
with others), and is now the author of Peers Inc., a lucid book on the power of peers
working together. She told us, “Leveraging the value found in excess capacity
depends on high-quality platforms for participation. These platforms don’t come
cheap. The blockchain excels in providing a standard common database (open APIs)
and standard common contracts. The blockchain can make platform building cheaper
and manageable.” That’s just the beginning. “Best of all, its common database makes
for data transparency and portability: consumers and suppliers can pursue the best
terms. They can also cooperate as peers on the blockchain to create their own
platforms, rather than using the capabilities of traditional companies.”
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Think of the car of the future itself. It would exist as part of a blockchain-based
network where everyone can share information, and various parts of the vehicle can
do transactions and exchange money. Given such an open platform, thousands of
programmers and niche businesses could customize applications for your car. Soon
such platforms could transform entire industries such as financial services by settling
all kinds of financial transactions and exchanges of value. A consortium of the largest
banks is already working on the idea. Platforms are the rising tide that lifts all boats.